Hello all!
After a year away from my Tor related research, I'm finally back at it. As I've introduced in the past [1] I wanted to build a Tor Browser Friendliness scanner that would scan the web and rate the Tor Browser friendliness of web pages. Unfortunately time got away from me for personal reasons, but I finally got the chance to work on the scanner and I feel it's close to being ready to run.
To re-introduce the concept: the scanner checks a web page for evidence of some activity that would likely cause the site to not render or run properly on the Tor Browser. This includes the tests listed below, which are motivated by the Tor Browser Design Document [2] and our own experiences analyzing what broke on the Tor Browser during analysis of some randomly selected websites.
_*Tests*_
1. Checks to see if the site supports HTTPS. If not, there's a problem. 2. Checks to see if the site serves JavaScript over HTTP. If not, there could be a problem on the Safer setting of the Tor Browser Security Slider, 3. Checks to see if there is auto-played media or hidden media. This could cause issues on the Safer setting of the Tor Browser Security Slider. 4. Checks to see if there is any evidence of usage of the following JavaScript libraries/functionalities. These were taken from the draft of the Tor Browser Design Document. 01. asm 02. battery status 03. game pad 04. graphite 05. media devices 06. navigator online 07. sensor 08. network connection 09. touch 10. web audio 11. webgl 12. webrtc 13. web speech 14. HTML canvas 5. Checks to see if the page contains JAR files or Flash files. 6. Checks to see if the page contains chrome:// or resource:// links.
Given this information, I have a few questions.
1. What other tests should I add, if any? 2. Is there any other feedback on this idea that you'd like to provide?
Please keep in mind that I intend on releasing the source code soon. At the moment it's in an "academic code" state, and I want to clean it up before release.
Thanks,
Kevin
References:
[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2019-March/013731.html
[2] https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/